Let’s Hope Year 2014 Will Herald The Restoration Of Democracy In Sri Lanka

By Shyamon Jayasinghe -December 24, 2013

Shyamon Jayasinghe

Sri Lanka is the realm of the Absolute Star. Our Leader has all within his grip. Like a cat that has caught a rat one observes a look of perennial satisfaction in Mahinda Rajapaksa’s face. For he smiles and smiles. Even in a temporary moment of what looked like him being  powerless when David Cameron did the old British Governor’s march to the North, our Leader beamed with his moustache.

Let’s be honest, what Sri Lanka now has is a quasi-military dictatorshipheaded by Rajapaksa. His regime continues to don the same democratic trappings that this once-free island nation had for decades after political independence. Elections are held regularly; there is a parliament and there are opposition parties. To the outsider all looks above board. However, our ‘democracy’ is only skin deep. Appearance and reality diverge sharply. An autocrat is in place backed by military units being set up in the periphery and called in to do the job of the police as we saw at Weliveriya a few months ago. Protests and revolts can be crushed, while a once-honorable and independent judicial system has been replaced by a pliant one that may adjudicate against the protestors and victims of executive abuse of power.

We see a dramatic parallel of appearance and reality in the collective behavior of the monks of the JHU in parliament who drape the sivura and talk the Dhamma but who by their language of silence over the bizarre happenings in governance reveal that they back high-level corruption, the drug connection, the casinos, the flouting of the constitution and rule of law, and state violence toward detractors. The JHU’s usefulness is in its symbolic status of representing Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism. Authoritarian regimes have been known to manipulate ideology. This is our governing establishment’s ideology and its modus operandi of gaining and keeping an electoral support base prepared to overlook abuse and incompetence.

Nationalism and anti- Semitism was Adolf Hitler’s ideological base; nationalism was Mussolini’s ideology; communism was Hitler’s and Mao Tse-Tung’s. Funnily, as if to make the Lankan regime contemporarily relevant, nationalism is also the ideology of North Korea’s ‘Dear Leader.’ The Communist ideology drove USSR into bankruptcy and demolition. Nationalist ideology drove the German nation into the abyss. Likewise Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism will drive the island nation to division and fracture. The rump of the terrorist LTTE and its backers world-wide are (hands-crossed) hoping to see this madness developing to the point when the lost hopes of Eelam can become achieved reality.Read More